The End and the Beginning

A write out wrap up

It’s that time—both the end and the beginning of a year. This construct of January to December, this annual reckoning, is upon us. Already I’m seeing people’s content-ified wrap-ups and I always do it too because what a freaking year it was, and why not scroll through the phone and select a bunch of photos that sum up how all-over-the-place / how great / how sucky it was, and wait…

What is the point of this exercise exactly? I forget. Who am I trying to convince, and convince of what? I keep circling around this idea of story-telling and wanting to go deeper, beyond what I want to tell, or show. There’s a sense of elusiveness, like a dream I want to remember that’s not coming back which is unsettling and confusing because it was recent, vivid and real. I try and imagine what a snake might feel like when it’s shedding it’s skin, but that doesn’t work well because snakes freak me out so hard. (You know me well enough to know that I definitely researched snake shed immediately, which is as close as I’ll ever get to knowing much about that topic, because I don’t even want to watch a video of it, not even a cartoon video.)

But I wonder if I’m trying to let go and lose a part of self-ness. Self shed. It’s unfamiliar and I don’t recall feeling this way. It is acute. I wonder if anyone else knows what I’m talking about. I wonder and ponder and eventually turn to writing, because the only way I’ve ever found to get through is to write through.

The stories I wrote for myself were supposed to be self-determination tales. I don’t mean the literal, writing memoir/book stories, more like the ones I tell myself: Why I am how I am, why I chose what I chose, why things went this or that way with this or that person or situation. Those narratives don’t really have an end. There’s always a postscript, an entire epilogue of questions about what could have been. What could still be.

This much I know: What I want to happen is more. Is that even okay, to want more? Even worse, all the death and loss of 2025 has made me insatiably greedy. The more people who die the more I want to not die.

I’m working on this, it seems a bit unseemly. But maybe it’s also why I’m a bit loathe to year-end wrap up 2025. This year, it feels like gloating. It’s like all the selfies on my phone rolled into one fuckyou immersive all encompassing hall of mirrors selfie and it feels like the opposite of what I need in order to shed.

It was a lot, wasn’t it? 2025? Even with all the good, the bad was just so, so bad. The last time I was this depleted by a year was 2020, covid. And maybe, just maybe, this is what I want to shed, not a part of me, but the residue; the stubborn stains of cruelty and the filmy coating that heartache leaves on every surface of life.

Anyway. Thank you for reading what I needed to write. Thank you for being here and opening this and any interest or time or subscription you can spare.

More: I saw a Waymo in Notting Hill the other day. Just last month, with absolutely no authority or knowledge, I’d proclaimed in Austin—a city overrun with Waymos—that this would never happen in London. How could it, with the number of two-way roads only wide enough for one car, constant gridlock, magic roundabouts, multitudes of pedestrian traffic and e-bikes? Not to mention the street layouts are based on a historical web of Roman villages, trade routes, and footpaths.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Robo-taxi rollout trials in a couple dozen London boroughs are expected to integrate fairly easily with existing traffic monitoring systems and data collected from “the Knowledge,” a rigorous test that black-cab drivers must pass to become certified.

Things are changing so fast, moving so fast. Everywhere, all lanes.

Most of us remember when tech innovations took decades: my first cordless home phone in the 80’s; my 90’s Nokia flips, the early 2000’s Blackberry (Brickbreaker!?) and eventually smart phones. The whole analog to digital transformation can be tracked, one thing led to another, it was linear and most of us kept up okay.

But what a wild ride it is now. I’m sure there’s plenty written about this by people with tons more knowledge, but judging by the state of things, humans seem to be incapable of socially evolving at the pace of what’s happened in the latter half of the information age—much less at the pace of what’s coming.

It still blows my mind that we/they managed to make this incredible world-wide-web-connecting-info-sharing phenomenon called the internet into a beast of burden for surveillance capitalism. Let’s just saddle up the 21st century with 20th century model systems of advertising because what’s better than finding new ways to make people buy shit?

Anyway. That’s all sad stupid stuff. And despite the beginning of this dispatch, how it might have come across, I’m happy about so much in this life. I had wonderful family time over Christmas, (also a way to make people buy shit) but, also a time crammed with friends, culture and food, nature and history, lowbrow humor and deep conversations. I can’t imagine a better way to end one year and begin the next.

I promised less, more last time. So will end this here and be back in 2026 with my incredible insights on turning 67—which I understand is a meme of a birthday thanks to more indecipherable weird 6/7 viral dumbness that makes schoolkids crack up.

Until the next beginning, enjoy this floofy end of a sheep I met on Christmas day.